TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Paul Rohrbach has been for several years the most popular author of books on politics and economics in Germany. He is a constructive optimist, but at the same time an incisive critic of those defects of character and political conditions which keep his people, as he thinks, from playing the great part in the world to which they are called.
In an age of materialism Rohrbach is an idealist, albeit a practical one. The military conquests of the world, he claims, count for little, and the moral conquests for everything. To make moral conquests, a nation must clean house, and divest itself of every vestige of a reactionary past. Freedom and democracy are the watchwords of the present, and a nation which claims its share in the shaping of the future of the civilization of mankind, must act according to them, at home as well as abroad.
Germany is the youngest of the world powers and the most thriving, but she has not yet found herself, so to speak. She is, however, capable also of being the most powerful, and of taking her place by the side of the